I'm an artist and writer who lives in the Appalachian foothills of Ohio. With this blog, I hope to show what happens when you make room in your life, every day, for the things that bring you joy. Strange...most of them are free.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Chet Baker tries. Oh, he tries so hard to please us. This video neatly encapsulates his relationship with Phoebe, who torments and bedevils him for her own (and her mother's) amusement. It is subtle, but it is all there for those who know this little gentleman. Like a fine actor, he can convey raging emotion with the twitch of an ear or the turn of a flew.

This particular evening, Phoebe had the idea to offer a bikkit to Chet Baker, without telling him what she wanted him to do to get it. So The Bacon ran through part of his trick repertoire, casting about until he settled on the one that would unlock the bikkit hand. Play Dead and Stay Dead was the key.

Do not miss the disgruntled look he gives me, the snickering videographer, at the outset of the bad dog training session. Why do you let her do this to me? Nor the stink-eye he levels at her. You and your stupid hand signals that don't mean anything.

Phoebe often proclaims that Chet Baker secretly hates her, but we don't think that's true. When she gets home from school he's a black inky streak out the door to greet her.

At the end of the session, we had to wipe up a small pool of Baker drool on the kitchen floor. How this dog suffers for our art.

As I write, Chet has a red bow around his neck and a cookie sheet sticker on his back. He is working on getting the neon-green fur off several tennis-ball type dog toys, using a wadded-up Christmas stocking as he platform. He started raiding all the presents, taking each one to the back of the couch, and chewing holes in the paper at about eight this morning. As soon as he figured out there wasn't a dog toy inside he was on to the next. He made an exception for a Hickory Farms summer sausage... Don't worry. He got five of his own presents. It was a very Bacon Christmas.

Call me Mrs. Snortay for there are a gaggle of gutteral guffaws gravitating from my gullet that are gallivanting around my galley getting gleefully glad greetings from my gallant gentleman, who is greedily gulping a grapefruit and glomming and gloating over a glass of grape or grain, which, i can't glean.

Ahh, Mr. Chet Baker. I hope there is doggeh payback! If this bad dog training happened today, Phoebe best check her bed tonight before she crawls in--I suspect you may decide to leave her the bikkit you FINALLY got to eat--but post-digestion! Ahem. Julie, your laughter during this video was delightful!

I can imagine Chet saying (in a voice eerily similar to Marvin the robot in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy): What indignities I suffer! Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and I am reduced to performing tricks for these monkeys with ideas above their station. *Sigh* Oh, very well... I DO love those treats....

About Me

I'm a natural history writer and artist, author of the lavishly illustrated books Letters from Eden: A Year at Home, In the Woods (2006), The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds With Common Birds (Oprah's Book of the Week, April 2012), and Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into the Nest (due out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2016). I'm a Contributing Editor to Bird Watcher's Digest, write book reviews for The Wall Street Journal, and I lead natural history excursions for Holbrook Travel when I'm not speaking at birding festivals around the country or trying desperately to finish a book.

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If you like what you see, and are tempted to lift something for your own use, you need to contact me and play Mother May I. Extra points for genuflecting and offering recompense, linkage, and obsequious tribute. If you reproduce my photos, art or writing without asking, I will track you down with my Googlehounds, and you don't want that. Aooooooo!